Trunk Line

A parking meter in Wheeling, West Virginia.

On our drive back to Indiana from New York last week, we stopped for dinner in Wheeling, West Virginia. This was the meter for the space where I parked across from Elle & Jack’s (which I recommend). It’s an old-fashioned mechanical meter, with slots for nickels, dimes, and quarters. All three were plugged. We took an outside table across from the space, where I asked the waitress what the parking hours were. “With all the construction downtown, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “You’re fine.” I suppose that meant the city wasn’t big on enforcement at the time.

But I was prepared to pay because I have a ParkMobile app, which I use here in Bloomington. With some experience at using the app, I’d like to make a couple of points about the shift of parking payment infrastructures from old to new.

First, it’s interesting that this parking meter is now just a sign for ParkMobile. The legacy design pattern had me fooled when I parked because it seemed to welcome coins before I discovered the slots were plugged. Also, the parking meters in Bloomington are a newer kind that are both mechanical and electronic: they accept quarters, while also displaying the ParkMobile zone. Since paying with coins costs less than using the ParkMobile app, we keep a cache of quarters in a little dashboard compartment for that purpose in our new used car (a 2017 VW Golf Alltrack, which I also recommend). But Wheeling made a good cost-saving choice by leaving the meters in place and putting a ParkMobile sign on them.

Second is that ParkMobile still has room to improve. A few weeks ago, I got a parking ticket during the two hours I bought from ParkMobile using the app. When I went to the city parking office to dispute the ticket, they told me the ticket was for my old New York license plate, which was still active on the app, but not the one I selected, which was for the current Indiana plate. ParkMobile should make it easier to delete an old plate and fix whatever went wrong after I selected the right one. I believe this is not an uncommon occurrence, because a conversation I half-overheard at the parking office suggested as much.

I have more thoughts about the transition of parking payment from legacy systems to apps on phones, but I’ll save those until I know more about the topic than I do now.